Midlife Mastery Journal

What You Want vs. What You Need

Recently, from a business, personal, and spiritual perspective, I've been doing a lot of meditating on [apparent] failure. Right now, I can't think of a more apropos topic for people facing and experiencing the midlife transition. For one thing, your successes don't precipitate a midlife crisis. In fact, an uninterrupted string of successes can actually insulate you from undergoing the midlife transition, leaving you for longer than expected — and longer than necessary — state of im-maturity. When you're 'blessed' with success, you may be getting what you want, but to your own detriment: not getting what you really need.

I ardently agree with Friedrich Nietzsche that "What does not kill me, makes me stronger." The contrary, may very well also be true: What pampers me, makes me weaker. Getting your own way may, for a time, seem like a triumph; but, is it really? Does it actually move you forward, or does it, more often than not, lead you further into imminent trouble? Do negative consequences hold you back in fact, or are they, rather, 'medicinal blessings'?

Here Comes Your Crisis!

It really doesn't matter at all how old you are. You can protest all you want about how you're not 'Middle Aged' yet. I don't care what generation you're a part of or not a part of. If you're an adult (at least physically or chronologically) and you're not paying attention to what's coming at you, there's a crisis out there with your name on. Count on it!

If you're one of those no-nonsense people who's hard-working and minding your own business, doing everything you're supposed to be doing right now, chances are you're laying the foundation for a doozie. When you wake up one day with your career in a shambles, your family shattered and your health a wreck, at least you'll be able to say, "I worked for it, I owe it to myself, and nobody is going to deprive me of it."

Remember how, in Dickens' Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley showed old Scrooge the links in the chain that he carried that so weighed him down? He told his old business partner how he had forged each link by his own hand, one at a time. And you? What kind of a chain are you forging. On one of the sites where I publish my articles, a critic complained that my thoughts were meaningless double-talk and unrelated to real-world issues like getting yourself hired. I have to admit that he's right: it is meaningless double-talk until you come face to face with your own personal, individual crisis; then you find yourself at a loss as where you are, how you got there, and how in God's name you'll ever get out.

When You Stand at the Turning Point

You have competency. That's not enough. You have experience. So do a lot of other people. You have long-term loyalty. That's not relevant. You have a family, a mortgage, car payments, expenses, tuition. It's not even a consideration. You're over fifty; it's too late to start over for crying out loud! Nobody's listening.

Do you stay where you are and wait for the inevitable call into the boss's office (or, even worse, security showing up at your desk unannounced with an empty cardboard box)? Do you commute in to the office every day wondering if today will be the day when the flying fickle finger of fate stops spinning and points at you? Do you start your job search today, expecting the worst, getting in line with tens of thousands of other women and men just like you with similar experience and expectations all looking for the same jobs? Or is today the day you take the great leap into the unknown and become an entrepreneur? Ironically, if you're an entrepreneur, will today be the day you give it up and go out to get an 'RJ' ('Real Job')?

The Well-Spring of Hope

Midlife doesn't just come upon you all of a sudden and without warning like a roaring avalanche. Instead, it creeps up on you gradually and quietly. In 1986, carbon dioxide gas, bubbling up from Lake Nyos, West of Cameroon, softly and silently killed more than 1700 people and livestock within a 25km radius. Most of those affected had no idea what had overcome them. Although you'll probably not experience those kinds of dire consequences at the onset of your midlife transition (it would probably not rob you of your life), you can, nonetheless, be robbed of much that you value and much that makes your life worthwhile.

As you progress more and more deeply into your midlife transition, if you haven't prepared yourself physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually for what's coming, you may find yourself plunging almost imperceptibly deeper into a sort of life-draining depression. You can almost feel your joy ebbing away, as those experiences that used to thrill and delight you now feel boring and silly. You may feel like some of your favorite pastimes are no longer worth the effort. For many men, even their sex lives become — dare I say it? — boring. How does it feel to be sinking ever deeper into a dull, gray sameness with no clear indication of a direction you could take that would improve your sorry state? It's a feeling not unfamiliar to many in the midlife transition: hopelessness. Is it any wonder that so many people try to break out?

The Mystique of the New

The year has changed . . . how about you? What changes are facing you in 2009? If you're a man in midlife, change has probably caught you like the incoming tide and is carrying you along with its often-understated power. Now, the question remains: what are you going to do about it? Your midlife experience may be causing you to experience your relationships, your career, and your own personality with restlessness, irritability, and discontent. Not surprisingly, you may be reaching the limits of your tolerance for those aspects of your life that are out of focus or discordant. Perhaps you're feeling cheated, as though you've been promised a bill of goods that were never really delivered. You look back at your decisions, and can't figure out where you went wrong . . . exactly where your path turned and headed you off into a direction where you never really wanted to go. Maybe you're thinking (especially now that everyone's talking about a tough new year ahead of us) that it's time to make a change.

Guys: here's were you'll need to be very, very careful. My generation (the 'boomers) are rapidly moving in to take the place of the depression generation as retirees and 'golden agers.' Most of you who will be reading this will be a generation or two behind me. That makes you many decades behind the folks who experienced years of joblessness, scarcity of food, and having to make do with (and for) the necessities of life. Theirs was the generation who learned (from bitter experience) about conserving and reusing whatever little was available to keep them and their families going. They experienced what 'luxury' really means (according to the vast majority of the world's population). They look aghast at our 'disposable planet' mentality. In our 'mentality of abundance' world, the 'poverty mentality' can find few adherents. When in doubt, we proclaim, throw it out and get a new one!

Repent! The End is Near! (3)

Here we are, experiencing New Year's Eve. We're thinking about kissing 2008 good-bye (and, perhaps, good riddance). Most likely, we're looking forward to tomorrow and a new beginning. I say, "Most likely," because, as a person having to deal with midlife, you may also have some other thoughts on your mind today. Are you thinking, perhaps, about the aches and pains that you have today that you didn't have at this time last year? Have you noticed that you can't lift as much weight as you used to (except around your gut, of course) and that your stack of 'skinny pants' is either growing larger or you're making ever more frequent trips to Goodwill with them? Were you attending more funerals last year of classmates, friends and relatives in your own peer group than ever before? Are you starting to think that the Grim Reaper has a target painted somewhere on you?

Tomorrow, perhaps, you're telling yourself that you'll start working on all those New Year's resolutions. Here's what I say: "Bah! Humbug!" Christmas isn't a humbug (as Scrooge found out), but New Year's resolutions certainly are! It's a time when all the fitness centers rake in the cash from people whom they'll never see again, come March. 12-step recovery programs see a steep increase in attendance after New Year's (which, by the way, they refer to as 'amateur night'). All the desperate cries of 'Oh, God! If you'll only get me out of this, I swear I'll never do it again!' come together in one loud chorus over the next few days. You and I want things to get better, but, in the pit of our stomachs, we have a very unsettling feeling that such may not be the case. For every year that passes, the spectre of mortality seems to loom just a little bit larger.

Repent! The End Is Near!

Well . . . to be honest with you, the end is near whether or not you choose to repent: the end of the year 2008, that is. We humans have a particular affinity for the ending of things: like graduations and funerals (not that there's any other similarity between the two). Yet, we mark transitions at least partly by looking backward while, at the same time, we're looking forward. That, my friends, is the nature of all change: it's a movement from something old to something new. We're transitioning from 2008 (and bidding all it held for us adieu) to 2009 with all the hope it has to offer us. Regardless of our experience with the old, we still believe in our hope for the new.

Over the last few months, I've received e-mails from a number of people — men and women — who have awakened one day to find that their spouse (in his or her mid-forties) has filed for divorce. They tell me a little about what has preceded this moment, and then comes the question: "What should I do?" As you can well imagine, there is no 'one size fits all' answer that will prove to be the 'magic bullet' that fixes everything. The road ahead is always totally dependent on the free-will choices that two individuals are going to make. Yet, as we approach the end of the calendar year, I think it wouldn't do any harm to offer some suggestions about what to do when a midlife crisis threatens to end a relationship. Here are some of the suggestions that I'd offer to anyone facing such a serious transition.

Reverse Your Downward Spiral

As I write this, 2008 is nearly over . . . only a few days are left and then: out with the old, in with the new. Of course, this 'old' and 'new' stuff is all just our invention, as is the arbitrary point in time when we mark the change of the year (by the time we hit the stroke of 12:00 PM on New Year's Eve, our planet will already be ten days into its next full cycle around the sun). For as long as humans have been around, we've been marking the changes of seasons and years, pretending that we're a part of a never-ending cycle of birth, growth, flowering, decline and death. So once again, we get ready to meet another New Year's Day and another new beginning and start the cycle all over again. Only, when we think this way, we're being more than slightly delusional. You see, regardless of how it seems, there are no cycles in our universe. When we see cycles, it's only because we're taking a two-dimensional view of our three-dimensional world.

The universe is expanding, our orbit around the sun is subtly shifting, our moon is creeping ever farther away from us as the forces of gravity act as a brake, slowing it down. The universe is not cyclical, but evolving: it's moving in a direction, from somewhere (and some-when) toward somewhere. With it, our lives evolve, too. Like old Ebeneezer Scrooge, 'We're not the men we were before.' If we look at our lives from too far above or below, we fail to see our progress, like viewing a spring from one end: it seems like an unbroken circle. It's only when we shift our perspective that we notice that the path of the spring takes it in a spiral, either upward or downward. Likewise, when you see patterns repeat in your life, you may be tempted to see them as repetitions of old lessons long learned but, in fact, they are brand new each time you revisit them because you are a different person and the world is a different place.

When Will I Ever Learn?

For both men and women, there are five stages of life: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, midlife, and maturity. Two of those stages are transition periods (adolescence and midlife), and these two have very many transitions in common. One of the biggest is the changes in sex hormone levels: in adolescence, they're increasing; in midlife, they're decreasing. Since hormones have a direct impact on every cell in your body, these changes have as big an effect on your body as the hormones themselves do. The variations themselves cause many of the physical and emotional side effects that we associate with these transition periods. In fact, they have more similarities than they do dissimilarities.

It's no wonder that we're tempted to compare these two very parallel life transition periods with each other. As you become more deeply involved in the midlife transition, doesn't it bring back memories of adolescence, with its hormone-induced spates of agony and ecstasy, clarity and insanity? As I look back on it now, I certainly can see the similarities. I also remember that, after a while, I settled into the routine of adulthood, focused on my career, my relationships, and keeping myself healthy and happy. Almost without my being aware of it, adolescence faded into my personal history, to be replaced by adult concerns. So, if the two transition periods are so similar, how long should it be before you leave the craziness of midlife behind you to 'settle in' to a comfortable maturity? One piece of advice: don't hold your breath!

Ravished by Midlife

As I was considering a title for this article, I wanted to find a verb that would express what's on the 'other side' of the midlife transition. I guess that I'm in quite a good mental state right now, because before I knew it, I had found the perfect word: ravished. It's a word that touches a number of very different -- and quite contradictory -- places in my psyche depending on the context and how I perceive the subject matter that I'm talking about. It can mean that I'm seized and carried away, like the spoils of war, or it can mean being taken over in a rapturous or ecstatic sense (the original meaning of enthusiasm: being overcome by a divine spirit). When I write about midlife, most often, I comment on the damage that the changes that men undergo at midlife can do to them when they're not managed well.

That's not the whole story, though. In fact, the effects of the midlife transition are really hardly more than side effects that accompany the main event. Unfortunately, too often the side issues capture so much of the attention that the main event gets completely eclipsed. The whole idea that we expect the word 'crisis' always to follow after the word 'midlife' should exemplify what I mean. That's also the reason why, whenever possible, I try to avoid the term 'midlife crisis.' It would be similar to expecting that 'accident' must always follow after the word 'automobile.' Just as we need our focus to be on the benefits of the automobile and avoiding accidents, our focus, in the case of the midlife transition, needs to be on what it means to be ravished by it -- taken over into a higher and more fulfilling stage of your personal evolution -- and on how best to avoid screwing this critical transition up by allowing it to degenerate into a crisis.